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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22958809">Hunter &amp; Hunted</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/arabmorgan/pseuds/arabmorgan'>arabmorgan</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 12:35:51</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,372</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22958809</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/arabmorgan/pseuds/arabmorgan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sandor makes a living out of catching criminals, but the Red Wolf has more than one trick up her sleeve.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sandor Clegane/Sansa Stark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>104</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Hunter &amp; Hunted</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Have another wacky AU. This one makes the least sense out of all of them, but just go with it I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Red Wolf had a modus operandi, and she had, as far as Sandor knew, never deviated from it even once. It only made her continuous escapes from the arm of the law that much more baffling.</p><p>Her typical hustle went something like this:</p><ol>
<li>She approached her mark, who was without fail sitting alone, below fifty, well-groomed and clearly well-to-do. Whether or not he had a wedding ring didn’t seem to matter to her.</li>
<li>Her flirting always began subtly, and if she felt that the mark was for whatever reason not right for her needs or unreceptive, she would excuse herself and repeat the process. If she found the right target, however, the true seduction would then begin.</li>
<li>It was something about the way she spoke, all the men who had fallen for her silly little ploy claimed. She was just as enchanting as her looks were striking. She laughed at all their jokes and looked at them coyly from beneath her dark lashes like they had thoroughly charmed her.</li>
<li>Eventually, they returned to her hotel room with her. She was a northerner, here in the south on holiday, or so she claimed, which only added to her exotic charm. She always had a little wine waiting for them, or a snack if they preferred not to drink. She had them wait in bed while she used the bathroom, and by the time she came out they were out cold from the sedatives.</li>
<li>That was when she robbed them blind. Took all their cash, their watches. She always left them their identification, although not always their wedding rings. The credit cards she returned after making all sorts of exorbitant purchases on them that very night.</li>
<li>And then she vanished. Whoever she was, she was certainly not Alayne Stone, the name with which she booked her rooms and gave to the men she brought back. Alayne Stone simply did not exist.</li>
</ol><p>It was infuriating. The Kings Landing PD had never before been so humiliated. They had multiple descriptions and sketches of the Red Wolf, multiple flashes of her caught on security cameras, and yet they still had not the faintest idea who or where she was.</p><p>It was six months of futile hunting before they set the Hound loose on her scent. Sandor Clegane was not, it must be said, the most motivated investigator, but he was certainly tenacious. Give him a week or give him a year, he’d always end up nabbing the culprit in the end.</p><p>It was just a matter of keeping his bloody eyes open, he insisted. There were always clues everywhere as long as he was willing to look. The only problem was that the rest of the department was blind as bats and twice as careless. He was surprised they’d ever cracked a single case between the single brain cell they all shared.</p><p>The Red Wolf, however, was taking up a fair bit of his considerable patience. There was a specific rotation of establishments that entertained the crowd she preferred to rob, but there was no discernible pattern to the order of the establishments she visited, and even less to be gleaned from the infrequency of her visits. Of course, she was stealing enough each time to keep her living quite comfortably for weeks at a time, so it was no surprise that she was nowhere to be seen otherwise. Never shit where you eat and all that.</p><p>Still, Sandor was a little worried that he’d been asking around enough for her to know that he was hot on her trail.</p><p>Or cold on her trail, as it was.</p><p>She didn’t sell any of her loot in Kings Landing’s black market either, that much Sandor was sure of. The jewellery, the latest smartphones that she snapped up with the swipe of a card – all of them disappeared just as she did. Perhaps she brought them back up north, if that was indeed where she truly hailed from, in which case he could have gotten the northern PDs involved, except the north had been locked in a chaotic civil war for the entire past year. Something about the ruling family being overthrown by some vicious young upstart or some rubbish.</p><p>Whatever the case, the north was too busy quenching its own fires to care much about the south and some small-time hustler.</p><p>And so Sandor took it on himself to go undercover. As undercover as a very large, relatively memorable man with half his face burned off could be. He probably could have gotten one of his better-looking colleagues to stand in as a potential mark – a certain Jaime Lannister sprang to mind, he with the face so unnervingly attractive that even Sandor could hardly believe he was real – but the Hound worked alone, no exceptions.</p><p>No woman, thief or no thief, was going to approach him with seduction in mind, and so he threw on his best smart casual look and squeezed himself into shadowed corners, or made gruff small talk with the bartenders. He observed the nightly crowds with narrowed eyes, and scoped out the bathrooms and the traffic outside each location. Ever so slowly, he made his rounds in the Red Wolf’s territory until he was sure that he knew it just as well as she did.</p><p>In the end, it took Sandor another four months to truly comprehend how formidable the Red Wolf really was, and then it was inevitable that he got hooked.</p><p>“Get me some chicken,” he grunted to one of the waitresses walking past, tilting his head slightly in her direction. He was in one of the nice bars that the Red Wolf liked, the only one she had picked a victim out of more than once. Not that he had ever even caught a glimpse of her supposedly ever-so-distinctive bright red hair anywhere before.</p><p>“Anything else, sir? More beer?” The waitress had stopped, pulling a notepad from the pocket of the small apron tied over her black miniskirt, and Sandor felt very much like sighing. If he’d wanted more beer, he’d have bloody well ordered it along with his chicken, wouldn’t he? Still, he wasn’t in the habit of snapping at overworked, underpaid service staff, and he only shook his head with a wordless grunt, flicking an uninterested gaze at the young woman before him.</p><p>She was pretty, ridiculously so in fact, but then he supposed the pretty young things with their too-bright smiles and too-short skirts were half the draw when it came to bars. He watched her go for a moment, jet-black hair swinging just past her shoulders, and then swept another casual look around the room. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it wasn’t as if he had really expected anything else.</p><p>The waitress returned two minutes later with a basket of fried chicken, but she didn’t leave immediately after setting it down before him. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir,” she said demurely, but one look at her and Sandor could tell that she wasn’t feeling a single ounce of embarrassment at what she was about to say. “What happened to your face?”</p><p>He felt his brow raise in surprise at the sheer impertinence of her words, and a laugh almost burst out of him at her fearlessness. “Childhood accident,” he said, probably in a far more gaily manner than he had ever said those two words. “Nosy little chit, aren’t you?” But he was smiling ever so slightly, and so was she.</p><p>“I’m sorry, I can never help myself. My mother says it’s my greatest failing,” she said conspiratorially, as if she was sharing a secret privy to none but the two of them. There was a slight riverlands burr to some of her vowels, and it softened her words, her mouth rounding and caressing each syllable before releasing it into the world. Her eyes were very blue.</p><p>“Well, be proud that you’re the first person to ever ask me about my face <em>to </em>my face, on our very first meeting,” he said dryly, the corner of his lips twitching as he watched her blink, a smile lighting her entire expression as she registered his words.</p><p>“Oh, I certainly am,” she assured him, her face bright and guileless, and all of a sudden, his vision tunnelled until he was seeing her and her alone. For a moment, he forgot all about the Red Wolf and her hapless victims; for a moment, he was only a man, looking at a very beautiful woman who was smiling warmly at him.</p><p>“What’s your name?” he blurted, the words slipping out of his mouth before he could even think them through. Never mind that she was probably far too young for him, at least ten years his junior, if not more. Never mind that she was currently working in a location rather crucial to his investigation and could eventually become a witness or a person of interest.</p><p>She hesitated at that, clearly surprised by his question, before a sheen of amusement made her blue eyes gleam. “Myranda,” she answered, her voice low with promise as she looked right into his eyes.</p><p>He tilted his head as if doffing an invisible hat. “Sandor,” he replied, searching her expression with a strange sort of tension in his chest, but for what exactly he had no idea.</p><p>“I know,” she said with a laugh, and then she turned and was gone, leaving only the lightest hint of warm skin prickling against his forearm.</p><p>Letting out a shaky breath, Sandor stared down at his chicken and began to eat, every sense of his tingling with the sharpened awareness brought on by sheer adrenaline. What a fool he was, to be swayed by the first pretty face to smile at him in an age. But it had been a pleasant enough interaction, and a welcome diversion from the seeming futility of his current investigation.</p><p>When he finally stood to leave, another waitress hurried up to collect his glass, her brown curls bouncing. He barely spared her a glance, but something made him pause in his tracks then, and it was the very same intuition that had won the Hound so many of his previous successes. Slowing, he flicked a glance over the short woman once more. She had a generous figure, and the nametag pinned to her chest was tilted upwards rather prominently as if begging to be read.</p><p>The name on the tag was <em>Myranda</em>.</p><p>“Myranda,” Sandor muttered, and the woman looked up, startled.</p><p>“Sir?” she said, her fingers tightening on the cloth in her hands.</p><p>“Are you the only Myranda working here?” he asked, although he had a feeling that he already knew the answer. The cold sense of dread that accompanied his dawning realisation was washing over him, leaving him stern-faced and rigid in disgust at his own stupidity.</p><p>“Yes, it’s just me. I’m Myranda,” the young woman squeaked, and there was no trace of a riverlands accent in <em>her </em>voice.</p><p><em>I know</em>, the black-haired girl had said when he had told her his name, but he had let her laughing eyes and her glittering smile quash every single warning signal she had been openly projecting. What a bloody idiot he was. As bad as the dimwits who let themselves believe that they had it in them to attract a gorgeous young woman clearly far out of their league.</p><p>Sandor didn’t bother to look around any further. He knew the Red Wolf would already be long gone.</p><hr/><p>She came to him again in a fast food restaurant of all places. He wasn’t even on duty, digging into his dinner with no care for the rest of the world around him, when she slid into the seat opposite. Her hair was still black as night, so black it could only be a dye job or a wig, but she wasn’t in any sort of uniform this time. Her legs were obscenely long in those shorts, he noticed.</p><p>“Hello, Sandor,” she said with a smile, and this time he knew quite well the reason for her amusement. The knowledge soured his mood, and he knew that his expression when he looked up was far from friendly, because something wary flickered in her eyes at the sight.</p><p>“Myranda,” he said dryly, and one corner of her mouth curled up even more at that.</p><p>“You can call me Alayne,” she said generously. She had lost her riverlands burr; her thick northern accent was well in evidence now, the seductive quality of her voice more apparent than ever. She had a deceptively soothing way to her, and he figured she’d be wonderful on the radio if she ever found a passion outside of crime.</p><p>Leaning back, willing himself to ignore the clear blue of her eyes and the slender knobs of her wrists, he said shortly, “What I <em>can </em>do is arrest you right this minute under suspicion of fraud and robbery. I don’t know what you’re playing at, girl, coming here and flaunting yourself in front of an officer, but –”</p><p>“Sandor,” she interrupted smoothly, and he blinked, quite befuddled by her cheek. “If you can catch me in the act, you can arrest me. But until then – well, I just wanted to say hello. It’s only polite if we’re going to be seeing plenty of each other, isn’t it?” She smiled coyly and touched his arm again, just above his wrist, before standing and walking away.</p><p>He stared dumbly after her, watching the beguiling sway of her hips as she sashayed out of the restaurant, and it took him a full minute to finally wonder why he hadn’t just jumped up and arrested her anyway.</p><p>He had just become what he had always accused his deadbeat colleagues of being. A walking dick with eyes only for a pretty face and a banging body. Fucking fantastic.</p><p>It seemed, however, that the Red Wolf remained determined to transform him into the most inept cop she could manage, because the next time he saw her, he quite clearly witnessed the very beginnings of her seduction play on a businessman not ten feet away from him, and yet he still failed to take her into custody.</p><p>She was the Red Wolf indeed that night, her lush, flame-red curls tumbling in gentle waves down her back. Her dress was carefully selected to be short but modest, her eyes lightly lined with black, and Sandor genuinely could not recall ever seeing any other woman look so utterly stunning. She smiled at him just once as she entered, and he recognised her smirk for the challenge that it was. She could have walked out upon seeing him and picked a target from any one of the other establishments he wasn’t staking out that night, but she had seen him and continued on anyway.</p><p>He watched her make her move, her laughter soft from across the room. The way she leaned towards the mark like she was drawn towards him, before pulling back as if remembering herself. The way she blinked at him, wide-eyed with amazement at whatever stupid yarn he was spinning for her. The carefree gestures she made as she spoke, always culminating in a brief, warm touch along his arm.</p><p>Sandor watched her carefully and sipped at his beer, and his own arm prickled in memory of the way she had brushed her fingers ever so casually over his skin. Sometimes she threw back her head and chuckled, and her gaze would sweep past Sandor’s hulking form in the corner, sullen and watchful. Her blue eyes would look right at him, into him, before she focused once more upon the grinning fool before her.</p><p><em>You’ll never catch me</em>, her every glance said. <em>You might want to, but you won’t.</em></p><p>Oh, he wanted to all right, although at this time of night Sandor hardly knew what he’d do with her if he did catch her. He was of the opinion that handcuffs would certainly be involved.</p><p>She excused herself at some point in the night and made her way to the bathroom, and Sandor finished off the rest of his beer as he waited. There was no way out for her there – he’d made sure of that the last time he’d poked around this place. Frowning at the businessman, who was now on his phone and smiling dopily to himself, Sandor waved his hand and called for another beer.</p><p>This was going to be a long night.</p><p>His mind wandered as the Red Wolf’s absence lengthened – he found that he couldn’t think of her as Alayne. He’d known it as her pseudonym for so long that it felt odd to even call her that in his mind.</p><p><em>If you can catch me in the act</em>, she’d said, and he imagined doing just that, bursting into the hotel room to find her buck naked and in the midst of retrieving her victim’s wallet from his pants. Although, he realised on further reflection, there really wouldn’t be any reason for her to be naked if the guy was already passed out. No, she’d still be fully clothed in that slinky little number she had on, and she’d look up in shock as he walked up to her and grabbed her wrists.</p><p><em>Caught you red handed, little wolf, </em>he’d say, and her eyes would darken to cobalt. She would struggle, surely, but he’d overpower her and force her arms behind her back, pushing her facedown onto the bed as he snapped the handcuffs over her wrists.</p><p>His beer arrived then, and Sandor swallowed dryly as he looked around. The Red Wolf reappeared a moment later with a fresh coat of lipstick on her mouth. She slid a sideways glance his way and her red lips quirked, amusement and acknowledgement all at the same time.</p><p>It seemed to Sandor that she talked for a long time with the businessman. The exhaustion snuck up on him from out of nowhere, pulling at his eyelids as he struggled to keep his focus on her face and the shape of the words on her lips. It made no sense – the hour was early yet. His fist closed around his glass, and again he saw her smirk in his mind’s eye.</p><p>She’d <em>drugged</em> him. She’d fucking drugged him. The appalling realisation hit him like a lightning bolt, but failed to wake him up all the same. He glared at her through a heavily lidded gaze as the other man stood and began to escort the Red Wolf out, a hand firm on the small of her back. Sandor wavered slightly on his chair, wanting to leap up and give chase but knowing that he would fall on his face the moment he tried. She must have put just a little of whatever she used on those men in his drink, just a fraction. Enough to make him woozy and uncoordinated, but not enough to knock him right out.</p><p><em>That bitch</em>, he thought, but there was something almost like respect curling in his stomach. Admiration, maybe, or just desire.</p><p>He’d never been outwitted before, and certainly not like this. The audacity of it made his blood boil.</p><p>She didn’t appear before him again for a long while after that little incident – he supposed she knew well enough that she had pushed him just about as far as she could without getting burned in return. Which was not to say that she stopped her antics – oh, she continued to play him like a fool, dancing about wrapping men around her little finger, except she now did it in places he was not.</p><p>She lured men out of bars right next door to the ones he sat in. She took them back to a different hotel each night he was off duty. He caught glimpses of her across the street and rounding the corners ahead of him, her bright hair a beacon. She took her cash and her expensive bits of technology and worked her magic on them, vanishing them off to he-knew-not-where, for a purpose he knew nothing about. Everything she did was a taunt, perfectly designed to send him panting after her, nose to the ground but never quite able to catch up.</p><p>His colleagues were sympathetic but secretly pleased, he was sure, that for once the Hound’s famous nose for crime-solving was getting him nowhere. Some perps, they sighed as they patted him on the back, just never got caught.</p><p>Sandor was, quite frankly, ready to throttle the Red Wolf if she ever came within arm’s reach of him again – but she never did.</p><p>A year after he started the chase, the Red Wolf took in the most massive haul of her career, a cool million or so dragons snatched from some filthy rich, unhappily married brat looking for a romp on the side, and then she simply vanished from Kings Landing, this time seemingly for good. Sandor remained on guard for three months more, but in the end even he had to admit that she was unlikely to return.</p><p>He was very much relieved that the ludicrous chase was finally over, but that little wisp of emotion curling in his gut seemed determined to infuse him with disappointment as well.</p><p>During that time, the displaced ruling family of the far-off north carried out a mysteriously-funded, well-armed attack to reclaim their family seat. They were successful, thus quelling the extended rebellion that had been plaguing that cold country for more than two years. The news made little impact in the insular south, although Sandor skimmed through the brief article with a nagging suspicion that he now knew exactly what the Red Wolf’s loot had been used for.</p><p><em>Well, it could’ve been used for much worse</em>, he thought dryly, and he left it at that.</p><hr/><p>When she returned, the leaves were only just beginning to fall with the turn of the season. He hadn’t thought about the Red Wolf in months, but he supposed that was exactly why she chose that very time to reappear.</p><p>Most mornings, Sandor grabbed a sandwich on the way to work and ate at his desk, but every Wednesday without fail he enjoyed a stack of warm pancakes at the shop right down the street from his apartment. It was, most of the time, the only indulgence he allowed himself when it came to food.</p><p>Just as before, she slid into the seat opposite his, a smile already on her face as his head shot up, lips twisted in a fearsome scowl. Her hair was as red as ever, gleaming copper in the sunlight filtering in through the glass. She had chopped half of it off at some point in the past months, and the ends sat just above her bare collarbones, bright against her the whiteness of her skin. She looked radiant.</p><p>“Hello, Sandor,” she said blithely, as if he was a friend she had seen just the week before.</p><p>“You’ve got some balls,” was the only thing that came to Sandor’s mind as he stared at her, sitting prettily before him like some magical woodlands elf come to life. “I’m not going to have to get my handcuffs out, am I?”</p><p>She cocked her head, her smile never fading. “Oh, I’m done with all of that,” she assured him. “I came back for you.”</p><p>His eyes narrowed suspiciously, pausing halfway in the act of cutting up his pancakes, and something about the set of her face softened. She looked less like she was chuckling internally at a joke he didn’t understand and more like, well, a very lovely woman smiling at a man she liked. It was extremely odd.</p><p>“I’m Sansa Stark,” she said, and she was watching him so closely that it took him a moment to register the name properly.</p><p>It was a familiar name, of course – the Starks were the ones who had won Winterfell back from Ramsay Bolton after all – but there was something about <em>Sansa </em>specifically that insisted on jiggling loose in his mind.</p><p>“We’ve met before,” he said slowly, watching the joy flood her face at those three simple words. “Gods, it was the day of the riots, wasn’t it? It’s been years.”</p><p>She had been so young then, only fifteen or sixteen, nothing like the sultry vixen sitting across from him. <em>This </em>woman would never have been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, walking alone past a group of rioters with their blood still up. He remembered hearing her screams echoing from the alley. He’d waded in roaring and torn the men off her prone form, all of them slavering like a pack of dirty beasts.</p><p>“Oh, it’s been a long time,” she agreed, “but I’ve never forgotten. You saved me, and I don’t think I ever got to thank you properly.” She reached out for his hands, forcing him to set his cutlery down, and brought his knuckles to her lips with a reverence that made him distinctly uncomfortable.</p><p>“Sansa,” he started, but there was really nothing he could think of to say.</p><p>“No one else would’ve seen a single glimpse of me, you know. The Red Wolf was very good at what she did.” Her smile this time was temptingly provocative. “You were my hero growing up, and when I saw you again after all that time – well. I wanted you, and I wanted you to want me too.”</p><p>Sandor felt very much like he had just been clubbed over the head. He stared at Sansa, at the shine of her eyes and the lift of her cheekbones each time she smiled. He could feel that wisp in his belly stirring, heating.</p><p>“You little tart,” he said, his voice a low growl. “I’ll show you just how successful you’ve been.”</p><p>Slapping a few bills down on the table, he abandoned the rest of his pancakes and swept out of the booth, pulling a laughing Sansa along with him. Thank the gods he lived less than two minutes away from this shop. Thank the gods for Sansa Stark. Thank the gods for every damn thing in the universe.</p><p>And he still had his handcuffs clipped to his belt too. Fucking fantastic.</p>
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